Most of the time, the gradual heating of the planet is an abstract concept. But in early June last year, as the smoke from hundreds of fires raging across Canada traveled across a continent, it became tangible for many Americans living on the East Coast.
As hundreds of thousands of people found themselves enveloped in a smoky haze, the health threat posed by climate change became visceral. We launched a live updates file at 4:28 am on June 7, capturing the impact of the smoke from upstate New York down to South Carolina. Our coverage included weather forecasts that detailed everything from the state of wildfires in Canada to wind patterns and projections for those living far from the conflagrations. Our reporters chronicled how this upended everyday life up and down the coast, from a Syracuse business owner to a family coping with school cancellations in Washington D.C.
A day later, The Post was able to produce a page that compiled and animated hundreds of frames of hourly data of fine particle pollution to show readers how the smoke plume was moving over the country. EPA collects and validates data from over 1000 air monitors around the country, but the monitors and their locations aren’t meaningful to people, so the Post aggregated large amounts of data from the monitors to metropolitan areas and created a lookup tool. This allowed readers to search for a place and see the impact from smoke pollution there, how it compared to historical data and when this pollution broke records.
